Sludge - Slashdot User

Saboteur Launch Plagued By Problems With ATI Cards 230

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday December 09, 2009 @01:58AM from the more-or-less-finished dept.

An anonymous reader writes "So far, there are over 35 pages of people posting about why EA released Pandemic Studios' final game, Saboteur, to first the EU on December 4th and then, after knowing full well it did not work properly, to the Americas on December 8th. They have been promising to work on a patch that is apparently now in the QA stage of testing. It is not a small bug; rather, if you have an ATI video card and either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, the majority (90%) of users have the game crash after the title screen. Since the marketshare for ATI is nearly equal to that of Nvidia, and the ATI logo is adorning the front page of the Saboteur website, it seems like quite a large mistake to release the game in its current state."

Comment Cost per incident (Score 1) 735

by Sludge on Monday November 30, 2009 @05:48PM (#30275270) Attached to: Should You Be Paid For Being On Call?

If you are a contractor, structure your agreement such that maintenance and support requests outside of the SPECIFICALLY DEFINED scope of work are charged on a per incident cost.

There is a long history (and associated case law) for per-incident support billing. Get behind that.

If you are an employee, get your employment expectations in writing. Do this before you are required to meet those expectations, and ideally in the context of discussing your compensation.

Chasing an employer for unexpected overtime fees sucks for everybody and gives you a bad reputation. Be proactive about compensation.

Is It Worth Developing Good Games For the Web? 82

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 09, 2009 @06:41AM from the infinite-free-flash-games-can't-be-wrong dept.

SlashSlasher writes "A friend of mine started up a Facebook MMORTG game called Realm of Empires with his buddies as a personal project. Over the last couple of years, I've seen it grow up from an idea into a thriving community. A lot of money and effort has been sunk into constant improvement. As a result, it has become one of the most polished and substantial applications I've seen on Facebook. It's been quite interesting seeing the action behind the scenes without being directly entangled. Normal gameplay is free but certain premium features do exist. Recently, after allowing an open beta of premium features, the users complained vehemently that they would have to pay to keep these special features. They went so far as to start a petition to stop them from charging for premium features. People are getting up in arms about features that can be bought for less than $3 a month. I know the project hasn't broken even yet, and more money is put into it every day. I had always assumed that developers would receive a chunk of the ad revenue they attract to Facebook; apparently I was wrong. Facebook only gives the developer a very small (and shrinking) piece of real estate to try and make money with. How are these people supposed to break even, let alone profit? What working business models exist for the small game developer? Are people just too spoiled by free, throw-away games to be a target market for anything significant? Are developers who want to make any money for their work forced to move to restrictive platforms like the iPhone or the console market? More details of their story are available at their blog."

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